For its first–and only?–narrative feature run, Spectacle is pleased to present Aaron Schimberg’s staggering debut feature GO DOWN DEATH. Acclaimed as one of the most distinctive, visually-stunning, and greatest undistributed films of the past year, it sits uneasily among rote indie festival programming. Naturally, we feel we make a great pair.

GO DOWN DEATH is a wry, sinister realization of a strange new universe, a cross-episodic melange of macabre folktales supposedly penned by the fictitious writer Jonathan Mallory Sinus. An abandoned warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, stands in for a decrepit village haunted by ghosts, superstition, and disease, while threatening to buckle under rumblings of the apocalypse. Soldiers are lost and found in endless woods, a child gravedigger is menaced by a shape-shifting physician, a syphilitic john bares all to a young prostitute, and a disfigured outcast yearns for the affections of a tone-deaf cabaret singer. Highlighted by offbeat narrative construction, stunning black-and-white 16mm cinematography and immaculately detailed production design, GO DOWN DEATH is a distinctively original film informed by American Gothic, folk culture and outsider art.

Accompanying the weeklong run will be appearances by writer/director Aaron Schimberg, producer/editor Vanessa McDonnell, and other surprises and performances including a pair of live SMELL-O-VISION midnights concocted specially for Spectacle’s audiences.